Chapter Ten #2
“What?” I stared at her, gore dripping from my mouth onto the floor below.
“Nasty one. Now.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant, but we had a panicked bunch of dark mages scrambling back to their feet and preparing to run us down, as we were now in front of the only passage out of there that wasn’t blocked by avalanches or zombie battles, so I had no time to ask.
I produced said spell, a vicious acid bomb from Gerald’s stash, because I was too rattled to conjure up anything. And I guessed it was good enough.
“Thank you,” Kimmie said, delicately taking the small orb.
Which, a second later, had become ten small orbs, hovering in the air in front of her, and then twenty. Because Kimmie was a multiplier, wasn’t she? One who sent the barrage at the scrambling mages with a slight flick of her hand.
“Another,” she said, as their shields took the pounding of what was basically a wave of acid suddenly crashing over them.
But they did take it, as their protection, unbelievably, held. So I handed her a Pile Driver, capable of delivering a shock specifically designed to compromise shields. But when shields were already compromised, it did something else.
Namely that, I thought, as a hailstorm of shuddering blows struck hard on the heels of the acid wave, and two mages stopped, vibrated madly for a second, and then blew apart as if they’d swallowed grenades.
The meaty chunks pelted us as well as the remaining mages, who were absolutely panicked now.
Especially when Dimas, who didn’t have anybody left to shield, dropped his own protection and used his power to compromise theirs, instead.
The remaining shields went down, and the mages screamed in terror, trying to flee, slamming into each other, and viciously attacking everything that moved, because there was nowhere to go.
And damn, I realized. We’d committed the cardinal sin, one Sun-Tzu warned about in his Art of War: “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” But we had the mages surrounded, and there were eight still on their feet, which, with their strength, was more like three times that number, not counting the bastard who had Jace.
And he hadn’t been standing idly by. Out of the hall behind us thundered what had to be a hundred reinforcements, and they weren’t ours.
They were Black Circle, drawn from the other markets down here at a guess, where they’d probably been rounding up even more people, until sent for when the zombie battle broke out.
They arrived at the worst possible time, and not just for us, but for Jace.
Because he wasn’t in the desperate knot of men fighting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by burning debris, smoke, blood, and meat.
He was somewhere else, but I didn’t know where, because the mage holding him had disappeared.
But I knew he was here somewhere; I heard Jace whimper as the knife slid in a little more because of the mage’s agitation, just a tiny sound. Felt it when his heart hammered in his chest in time to my own. Tasted his fear and pain and anger and humiliation in the air.
It was all as clear as if it were happening to me.
And suddenly, the vicious spells being flung around, the magical snares catching Caleb and throwing him to the ground, the screams from Dimas to “get behind me, get behind me now!” all faded into the thunderous beat of my heart.
To the point that the rest of the room practically whited out, as I felt Jace being dragged forcibly back across the space, while some paralytic rendered him helpless.
Felt him being taken from me, just as his brother had been.
A sound clawed its way out of my throat suddenly, not a howl but a soul-deep cry of pain, fear, and fury, so loud and so long that it resonated in the room’s excellent acoustics like thunder.
Abruptly, there was almost silence in the midst of the battle, a pause as there had been when the avalanche happened.
A hundred battling pairs looked up, each face as startled as the last, and the reinforcements barreling this way broke stride, staring around as the cry resonated and came back at them from all directions, leaving them unsure where it had come from and what it meant.
For a second, there was only the sound of crackling fire and the thud, thud, thud of dismembered zombie parts slapping the floor as the room held its breath.
And then a lone voice answered, a distant howl from the very edge of my hearing, what had to be close to a mile away.
It was thin on the air, a faint, reedy sound, but beautiful nonetheless, like a wolf glimpsing the last ray of sunlight before darkness swallowed the Earth. And soon, it wasn’t alone.
More and more voices took up the song, chiming in from all corners of the room and beyond, far beyond.
Until it was a chorus, like a pack released under a full moon, only they weren’t my pack.
But they were answering nonetheless, even those who had almost escaped and now hesitated, turned back, came running.
Unearthly howls echoed around the space, raising the hair on my arms with the power behind those voices.
Clan power, although none of them were clan anymore, but they had the same blood in their veins, the same heritage, the same magic.
And it was everywhere now, dozens and then hundreds of cries, wild, eerie, and resounding from as far as my voice could reach.
They had heard, and they were coming.
Not some of them, all of them, hundreds and hundreds of the vargulfs the Black Circle had thoughtfully gathered in one place, and that Jen had set free.
And that, instead of fleeing as they had every right to do, they were sweeping this way like a rising tide, and descending onto the room and the suddenly terrified mass of mages in an ocean of fury.
And shielded or not, no one could stand against that.
The Black Circle’s ranks broke almost immediately, immovable objects learning that they weren’t so immovable, after all, when the irresistible force coming at them was composed of claws and fangs and full-on rage.
The room quickly turned into a massive battlefield, and I waded into the fray, heedless of the fighting, tearing, and screaming, and the dust and red rain falling all around me.
I didn’t care about that, didn’t care about anything except getting to Jace before it was too late, getting him back—
The mage had disappeared using some skill I didn’t know to allow him to run while the others died for him, their blood masking his scent. Only not from me. I couldn’t track; I’d had no way to learn to do that growing up as a human, as an outcast in my own clan.
But I wasn’t human, and instinct was a good teacher, I realized, grasping hold of a thin line of something…
Not a scent, not even the echo of one, but something.
Fractured, torn pictures of Jace’s dark eyes, of his rumpled tuxedo, of him ruffling the hair of his lost brother, Jayden, who had batted his hand away, yet looked up at him in love: “Not the hair, man. How many times I hafta tell you?”
And then I was moving, darting through the madhouse and avoiding the obstacles suddenly springing up in my path.
Lines that a moment ago had been showing off second-hand clothes were now trying to wrap themselves around my neck or trip up my feet.
Piles of merchandise were going up like miniature bonfires, sending the smell of smoking cloth and burning plastic to obscure my senses.
Even worse, tables of low-level spells and hexes, which the people here purchased in the thousands, hoping against hope that they would buy them some protection in an uncertain world, all went up at once—
And that almost did it. Almost made me lose focus enough for the bastard dragging Jace to get away. But something—something—something—
There! I grabbed the scent, the memory, the whatever it was, a whisper of a whisper on the air, because I swore this devil was smoke, a magician in every sense of the word. But then, so was I.
And I was something more; I was a Lupa terrified that she was about to lose her cub, just like she’d lost his brother.
I could still see Jayden, leaping oh so fast, like lightning against the night, for the throat of the Relic who had been endangering his clan.
I could see the broken body lying so still on the ground, when even his liquid speed hadn’t been enough.
Could trace the ashes of his funeral pyre, blown ever skyward, glowing silver in the moonlight at the top, even while the coals were blood red down below, as his spirit slipped away from us…
Not. This. Time.
Not Jace.
Not my boy.
And then I leaped, and felt something under my claws.
Something smooth and hard. A ward, and it was the mage’s. I knew that immediately because it was perfect.
Glass shields, without a single imperfection into which to slip a knife.
But I didn’t need a knife; I had claws. I felt fur flow down my dominant hand as they came out, huge and curved and strange, not like my usual Change at all, and began carving great gouges out of the fucker’s protection even though I still couldn’t see them.
But I could feel, and those perfect shields were getting thin.
“Mage de Croissets! Where are you?”
The voice was tinny and distant, resonating through some comm spell Gerald must have had on his coat, but I barely heard. Almost, almost, almost. My mind, my very not-human mind, was focused on only one thing, and that picture was painted in blood.
“Mage de Croissets! We’re homing in on your position. Are you hurt?”
No, but someone else was about to be, I thought, as spell after spell slammed into me.
And they were strong, oh, so strong, far more so than should have been able to come from any one mage.
Like each was a combined spell from a dozen others, and while my coat stopped or deflected some of them, because Gerald had spelled this thing halfway to hell, it didn’t get them all.
It didn’t get most.
I was bleeding, my own blood this time, and snarling, and shredding the mage’s shields like I didn’t feel any of it, because I mostly didn’t.
I didn’t know why I didn’t, and didn’t care.
Just that the spells he was flinging, which should have had me down, which should have had me dead, were more like bees’ stings: hurtful, but not important, not debilitating, not enough.
And somebody, a lot of somebodies, were suddenly pounding down what I vaguely recognized as a corridor behind me.
A small one, little more than a crack in the earth that I hadn’t known about, like a lot down here that weren’t on any of the maps, and that I’d entered without even being aware of it.
A quiet one, except for the growls coming from me and the harsh breathing from him.
And those booted footsteps, war mage footsteps, were headed this way, and this time, they weren’t his people, were they?
No, they were dead, dead, dead, nature red in tooth and claw tonight.
Which meant they were mine.
“Your friends are dead, and you’re out of time,” I growled. “Give him to me—
“Fuck you!”
“Give him to me, or I’ll rip you to pieces and take him!”
And then Jace was in my arms, so suddenly that I went staggering backward, clutching him to me, one arm still human and the other Were, but both hugging him tight.
And he was sobbing and hugging me weakly back, and the corridor was dark and empty and echoing…
with nothing but footsteps. Not even a thread of a clue anymore to where my prey had gone, because I had been following Jace, not the mage.
Who had vanished as swiftly as the wind, and just as completely.